non-core response: "black museum," 'black mirror'

http://racebaitr.com/2018/01/10/black-museum-black-mirrors-cleverly-disguised-example-black-torture-porn-yet/

like the author, Brittany, i too spent part of winter break consuming and consumed by Black Mirror. it's hard to say what drew me to it now--i've never seen another season of Black Mirror beyond those episodes canonized by their repeated showing in cinema and media studies classes at USC. that's a bit of a misnomer: i had seen and only seen "Nosedive," whose (intended) message i found misplaced insofar as it produced equivalences between different modes of carcerality that i didn't find generative, or i found generative of an ideology that reinforces that very carcerality. in any case, i found this critical review of the "Black Museum" episode of Black Mirror to be interesting for a number of reasons, particularly in a week that Marshall McLuhan seems optimistic about the potentials of a "cool medium" like television, with its forward-dawning/surrounding occupation of acoustic space, to repair racial relations (if i'm reading him right). this article brings up questions about representation and seriality (representation in the flow), authorship and intentionality, habituation to the shocks of euro-american modernity and racial capitalism, and questions of ideology and assimilation, which i think are brought up nicely here:

Ironically, while “Black Museum” is, explicitly, a send-up of Black Mirror, it is implicitly an indictment of the show as well. The episode is a jarring analogy of Black pain and white people’s willing consumption of it. Consequently, Black Mirrorinadvertently reveals itself as a proprietor in the commodification of Black suffering. Its viewers, like Black Museum visitors, can not only hear cautionary tales of technology and science, but also view Black violence without consequence. That violence is quite rudimentary, yet more harrowing than the other “exhibits.” As each subsequent visitor becomes more and more numb to Clayton’s anguish, so too does Black Mirror’s audience with each display of Black suffering throughout the series.
Just as Nish killing the curator doesn’t free the pieces of her father that are still eternally suffering, watching that scene doesn’t atone for all the timesBlack Mirror was unimaginative in its depiction of Black people.

i'd love to hear what other folks thought of this episode, this critique (btw, racebaitr is great, well-paying, supportive editorial community for black radical thinking--support them if you can!), or whatever emerges